A whole mess of people are on a mission to make you stop driving to work so much. I’m one of them. Stop driving to work. Seriously.  

 

Wait … I guess they just want you to try other ways of getting to work. You know, other than driving by yourself. We’ll talk about abolition of work some other time.  

 

Truth be told, reducing single-person trips to and from work is not a new idea. It has been heralded as one of the easiest ways to tackle mounting concerns about petroleum dependence, air pollution, global warming and lung cancer, to name a few. 

 

Remember carpooling? Well, commute trip reduction is the new carpooling. 

That’s why the Washington State Department of Transportation gave a handful of cities a bunch of money — Tacoma received $300,000 — to figure out ways to shift downtown workers and residents away from their cars and toward buses, bikes, light rail and vanpools. Some of the more exotic options include so-called compressed work weeks, like they have in more advanced industrial nations, and telecommuting, which is a fancy way of saying “working from home.”  

Tacoma officials, meanwhile, are days away from receiving a survey report tallying reports from local workers, who were asked to provide information about how they get to work and what kinds of alternatives they might consider. Options range from riding a bicycle to working from home a couple days a week. In Tacoma, some of that money also will go to education and outreach programs; efforts to increase non-single-car commute options at the University of Washington Tacoma; working with larger employers —  defined as having 100 or more employees —  to help their employees find alternatives; develop a Web site called PierceTrips.com to promote transport options; working with residents in Tacoma’s St. Helens neighborhood to promote walkability; and a few other things like hiring walkability guru Dan Burden to come and teach us how make Tacoma a more ambulatory kind of place. City officials also mentioned that somewhere there  is an intern looking into getting Tacoma a Zip Car, which is like a time share condo, only it’s a car. 

 

“The overall goal is to reduce car trips by 10 percent,” says Diane Wiatr, mobility coordinator for the City of Tacoma Planning Division. “If any of the work is effective, then efforts can be duplicated.” 

The overall program was given an awful name by legislators — the Growth and Transportation Efficiency Center Program (zzzzzzzz ...). Thankfully, Wiatr and her fellows in Tacoma have changed the name of local efforts to “Downtown on the Go.” The goal, in brief, is to try out a few strategies to see if any of them work. If they work in cities such as Tacoma, Seattle and Olympia, those strategies will be repackaged and used elsewhere. 

 

If early experiments go really well, the state might even pay for it, says Wiatr. 

For now, one of the greatest drivers (sorry) of efforts is skyrocketing gas prices. In fact, higher gas prices may be encouraging people who would normally remain apathetic about commute trip reduction to get with the program. Nearly half of the people surveyed by staffing firm Robert Half International said that higher gasoline prices have affected their commutes. Many of them said that prices were of such concern that they had made plans to cut their daily commutes in a number of ways. Alternatives cited included carpooling, using more fuel-efficient cars or telecommuting.

Nearly a quarter of people surveyed said they were cutting back their work weeks to cut trips and save money on gas. 

 

“We could institute a two dollar gas tax, and it would do more to reduce trips than all the work I’m doing,” says Wiatr.